Space

Excerpt from the article:

If all goes to plan, next February could see the return of humans to the moon. Four people — NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will see it as no one has before. Not even the Apollo astronauts, as much of it was dark during their missions.

Artemis II is a mission to send the four around the moon, taking them farther than any human has ever been. Their goal is to help prepare for Artemis III, which will see boots on the moon for the first time since 1972.

While they are tasked with testing out the spacecraft's many systems and abilities, the four are also very much human guinea pigs in space.

During the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s, NASA collected rock samples from the moon and conducted experiments on its surface, but one thing it didn't do is learn more about how the human body reacts to deep space.

Artemis is looking to change that.

"Our top priority is to bring our friends safely home," said Jacob Bleacher, NASA chief exploration scientist, at a press conference last week.

"To do that, we have developed an integrated research campaign that will support all of our future Artemis missions to make sure that we can travel safely in space and bring everybody home. And that really starts with trying to understand the space environment."

...At current costs, a lunar program of four launches per year would consume $16 billion annually—a large fraction of the agency’s entire budget. This isn’t just expensive; it’s economically incoherent as a foundation for sustained lunar presence...

...The Trump Administration initially proposed a historic 24% cut to NASA’s budget, including 47% reductions to science programs. Congress is moving to restore those cuts, but only after months of uncertainty that disrupted program planning and contractor relationships— exactly the kind of instability that drives up costs in complex technical programs...

...Real economic priorities don’t face 24% budget cuts in the first place...

...Rushing to meet arbitrary political deadlines means accepting higher costs and technical compromises that increase long-term program expenses. The SLS exemplifies this problem: a vehicle designed by political requirements rather than economic optimization, resulting in costs that make sustained operations prohibitive. The political imperative to use existing contractors and proven technologies to minimize schedule risk actively inhibits the cost-reducing innovations that could make lunar operations economically viable...

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Led by Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa, the study asserts that if the basic strengths of nature's forces (like gravity) slowly change over time and in space, they can explain the strange phenomena we observe, such as the way galaxies evolve and spin and how the universe expands.

The study, titled "Testing CCC+TL Cosmology with Galaxy Rotation Curves," is published in the journal Galaxies.

Challenging established concepts

"The universe's forces actually get weaker on the average as it expands," Professor Gupta explains. "This weakening makes it look like there's a mysterious push making the universe expand faster (which is identified as dark energy). However, at galactic and galaxy-cluster scale, the variation of these forces over their gravitationally bound space results in extra gravity (which is considered due to dark matter). But those things might just be illusions, emergent from the evolving constants defining the strength of the forces."

He adds, "There are two very different phenomena needed to be explained by dark matter and dark energy: The first is at cosmological scale, that is, at a scale larger than 600 million light years assuming the universe is homogeneous and the same in all directions. The second is at astrophysical scale, that is, at smaller scale the universe is very lumpy and direction dependent. In the standard model, the two scenarios require different equations to explain observations using dark matter and dark energy. Ours is the only one that explains them with the same equation, and without needing dark matter or dark energy.

"What's really exciting is that this new approach lets us explain what we see in the sky: galaxy rotation, galaxy clustering, and even the way light bends around massive objects, without having to imagine there's something hiding out there. It's all just the result of the constants of nature varying as the universe ages and becomes lumpy."

...Earlier this century, some very strong evidence arrived showing that there was a Universe before the Big Bang, demonstrating that the Big Bang wasn’t truly the start of it all...

...The differences between a Universe that began with a hot Big Bang and a Universe that had an inflationary phase that precedes and sets up the hot Big Bang are subtle, but tremendously important...

...in a Universe that underwent a period of inflation prior to the start of the hot Big Bang, we’d expect there to be density fluctuations on all scales, including on scales larger than the speed of light, which could have allowed a signal to travel since the start of the hot Big Bang...

Although later fluctuations superimpose themselves atop the older, earlier, larger-scale fluctuations, inflation allows us to start the Universe off with ultra-large-scale fluctuations that shouldn’t exist in the Universe if it began with a Big Bang singularity without inflation.

...At any moment in the Universe’s history, there’s a limit to how far a signal that’s been traveling at the speed of light since the start of the hot Big Bang could’ve traveled, and that scale sets what’s known as the cosmic horizon...scales that are greater than the horizon, known as super-horizon scales, are beyond the limit of what could’ve been caused by physical signals generated at or since the start of the hot Big Bang.

...When we look at the final (2018-era) Planck TE cross-correlation data, below, the results are breathtaking...As you can clearly see, there can be no doubt that there truly are super-horizon fluctuations within the Universe, as the significance of this signal is overwhelming. The fact that we see super-horizon fluctuations, and that we see them not merely from reionization but as they are predicted to exist from inflation, is a slam dunk: the non-inflationary, singular Big Bang model does not match up with the Universe we observe.

https://archive.ph/02RAr

Astronomers have found that a relatively close white dwarf – the remaining hot, dense core of a dead star – is having a planetary snack. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Warwick in the U.K., said on September 18, 2025, that a white dwarf is consuming a fragment of a former Pluto-like object. The researchers said they found evidence of the cosmic meal when viewing the white dwarf WD 1647+375 in ultraviolet light with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The white dwarf’s strong gravity pulled in the icy Pluto-like world and then tore it to pieces.

Most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hydrogen. But surprisingly, less than 20% of this hydrogen sits inside galaxies. The rest lies in the vast spaces between them – the so-called intergalactic medium.

This cosmic reservoir is thought to fuel the birth of new stars, as gas slowly falls into galaxies over billions of years. Yet much of that material doesn’t stay put: supernova explosions and powerful outflows from supermassive black holes can fling gas back out into intergalactic space.

The push-and-pull between inflows and outflows is central to understanding how galaxies grow and change over cosmic time...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II